Utz Ermel

@uermel.bsky.social

Scientist at bi[o]hub, Redwood City, CA I like to make open source cryoET things.

My personal summer of code continues with another ChimeraX plugin - this time, MorphometricsX! Load quantified meshes from morphometrics (or pycurv) in ChimeraX with color-by-quantification and display alongside tomos and particles. Coming to the toolshed soon! #teamtomo github.com/baradlab/mor...

Screenshot of MorphometricsX rendering mitochondrial membrane surfaces in chimera with color-by-quantification.

🚨Open call to the Cell Tracking crowd out there🚨! Loïc's team at @biohub.org opened our Kaggle Challenge for 3D cell tracking, with $60k of prize money💰. Spread the news, delve into our gigabytes of imaging (zarr3) and cell tracking (geff) data of developing zebrafish embryos, and start tracking 🤩

Loïc A. Royer 💻🔬🧪@loicaroyer.bsky.social · last mo.

1/ 🧬🔬 How does one cell become an entire animal? We can now film it in 3D 🐟, but turning those movies into accurate cell tracks is brutally hard. Enter our new #Kaggle challenge: $60K prize pool, to help crack 3D+time cell tracking at scale! 🧵👇 www.kaggle.com/competitions... @biohub.org

Inspired by Utz, I ported the old Briggs lab tools to ChimeraX in a single bundle named Geopickr, with some extra utilities (geopicking on morphometrics surfaces!). I've submitted it to the toolshed, but in the meantime: github.com/baradlab/Geo...

Geopickr enables particle picking on surfaces, spheres, tubes, and filaments interactively in ChimeraX!
Utz Ermel@uermel.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Claude Code is pretty good at writing ChimeraX plugins! This one is almost entirely good context and some prompting: github.com/uermel/chime... Most likely older plugins could be ported over that way relatively easily.

Cryo-ET gives unparalleled views of cellular structures, but targeted sample preparation by cryo-FIB milling has been a constraint. No longer! A new workflow yields close to 100% targeting success for centrioles & other small structures. Read the preprint ⤵️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Diagram of FIB-SEM with integrated fluorescence microscope alongside cryo lamella micrograph and 3D segmentation highlighting targeted centrioles

In a series of 3 papers and preprints, we’re thrilled to share with you the working laser phase plate. In collaboration with research led by Holger Müller at UC Berkeley, this is a huge innovation in imaging to make small and faint objects inside cells visible. bit.ly/4vK9LVn

Waves of laser light coming from four different directions and meeting in the middle brightly inside the cavity of the laser phase plate

Proteins are the machinery of life. Billions of their sequences have been cataloged—but the biology behind most is still unknown. Today we're releasing ESMFold2, ESMC and ESM Atlas to help change that. Open source, open to every scientist. biohub.ai/esm/protein

Tired of knowing what you are looking for in your tomograms? Why not try bluesky-less Frosina's new self-supervised algorithm for semantic segmentation and particle picking for #teamtomo (includes a new denoiser without the need for odd/even tomos) Code is on GitHub if you want to try it out

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bioRxiv Bioinfo@biorxiv-bioinfo.bsky.social · 9mo ago

CryoSiam: self-supervised representation learning for automated analysis of cryo-electron tomograms https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.11.687379v1

Hi #teamtomo! Want to use OME-Zarr for your tilt series but can't integrate it with your existing sub-tomogram averaging pipelines? Try zarr-particle-tools - RELION-style extraction & reconstruction built for OME-Zarr-based workflows! 📦 pip install zarr-particle-tools 🔗 github.com/czimagingins...

GitHub - czimaginginstitute/zarr-particle-tools: Particle extraction and reconstruction from OME-Zarr tilt series.

Particle extraction and reconstruction from OME-Zarr tilt series. - czimaginginstitute/zarr-particle-tools

github.com

Stunning cover to celebrate the incredible work from @loicaroyer.bsky.social's team. Learn more about Ultrack, a powerful tool for fast, accurate and scalable cell tracking: biohub.org/life-science... 🧪

Nature Methods@natmethods.nature.com · 9mo ago

Our November issue is now live! 🎉 www.nature.com/nmeth/volume... On the cover, cell tracking in a developing zebrafish embryo visualized using Ultrack. Cover by Alexandre Dizieux, Jordão Bragantini, Loic Royer, Merlin Lange, CZ Biohub. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

EvolutionaryScale will be joining forces with Biohub to create the first large-scale scientific initiative combining frontier AI & frontier biology. Together, we're building world-class compute, AI research & state-of-the-art technologies to cure or prevent disease. bit.ly/4nOUGO4

Biohub launches initiative combining frontier AI & frontier biology

The large-scale scientific effort combines frontier AI with frontier biology to accelerate discovery and solve disease.

bit.ly